


Niggling Little Doubts

by orphan_account



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: 5 Things, Community: inception_kink, Gen, POV First Person, Revenge, significant lack of porn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-11-15
Updated: 2010-11-15
Packaged: 2017-10-14 04:16:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,781
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/145283
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For the inception_kink prompt: "Five times the Dream team was badass and one time they were not."  Or, Robert Fischer: Crouching Playboy, Hidden Badass.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Niggling Little Doubts

**Author's Note:**

> Additional warning for kidnapping

1.

Some days, I’m not sure what’s real and what’s not. No, that’s a lie. I can distinguish reality for many things, really. This report I’m holding, that’s real enough. This desk, my office, Rossell in the corner – they’re all painfully real.

This rage that I’m feeling, carefully hidden yet making my whole body burn? I know it exists, but where did it come from? Is it mine, or someone else’s?

Did it come from one of them?

-

They beat the boys in Jakarta. I hadn’t thought they’d be able to, actually. Felix was the dreamthief who trained me, and he’d said he was the best. When they’d taken the job that Rossell had offered them, I’d expected Felix to turn the tables and report back within an hour that he had confirmation – and that Cobb’s team were all dead.

Instead the fool called Rossell three days later, pleading, begging to know if I’d been behind the team that had invaded his mind. Rossell had gone to talk to him, to calm him down, and had brought back this report.

It had all started well enough: Felix knew that he was being followed in the real world, knew that first dream was a dream, had caught on that the hot blonde woman was really a chubby red-haired man. Then they’d taken him to a second dream level, the proverbial dream within a dream, and things had fallen apart. Who’d have expected that they’d be able to avoid his subconscious army by conjuring a submarine to navigate Venice? Who’d have expected them to hold off the army by blowing up what must have been every damn bridge in the city? Who’d have expected them to overcome all those odds and still get to the little girl waiting in La Fenice who wanted to tell them all of Felix’s secrets?

I wouldn’t have expected it, but I’m not in the dream extraction business. Until his unfortunate death, though, Felix had been, so I do hold his failure against him.

2.

Apparently they learned from the last mission that when you can control the setting, bridges are very useful. The next dream was a city built entirely of bridges in the sky. The mark, an old friend of mine who bought up far too much of my father’s empire for me to really trust her and whose plans for her new fortune I dearly wanted to know, told me that it was the most beautiful thing that she’d ever seen, that city in the clouds.

She also told me that when she’d thrown the safe containing her secrets over the edge of one of the bridges, the team had been prepared, and had rappelled off those miles-high bridges after it.

Since Rossell brought me her ideas for future investments, I’ll assume they caught up to it.

3.

I can’t even look at him anymore. The man I used to turn to in every crisis, my most trusted confidante, hell, the man who I loved more than my own father, for fuck’s sake, and now when I look at him, I can’t help but feel uneasy. I know, consciously, that none of it was true, that he really does want what’s best for me and that _those people_ are responsible for any niggling little doubts I might have in my mind.

The fact that I know that doesn’t make any of those niggling little doubts go away.

Even though he’s the one who came to me and asked if something was wrong and started me down on this path to discovery, even though he’d been watching me with enough care to notice something was wrong before I did, I still can’t bring myself to trust him.

-

The third job wasn’t one of mine. Rossell had found out about it, of course, since it’s Rossell’s job to find out everything about those five. An arms-dealer in Chicago had hired them to find out which member of his inner circle was reporting to the police. Six of his men had been loyal. The seventh hadn’t been suborned; no, the seventh was an undercover FBI agent.

When I’d found out, I’d laughed. Attempted dreamtheft on an American federal law enforcement agent has some pretty stiff penalties, as do resisting arrest, carjacking, kidnapping said federal agent and transporting him across state lines, hijacking a private plane and whatever incidental crimes they’d committed along the way. The team had all had huge bounties on their heads for a couple weeks.

I’d put a couple words in with some friends, though, and had those bounties quashed. If anyone is going to take those bastards down, it’s going to be me.

Although, I can’t speak for what Agent Ramirez is going to do. Rossell’s report did include some of the things he was threatening when they found him duct-taped to the bottom of a dumpster in Toronto, and he certainly seems like a creative sort.

4.

I go to my father’s grave every Wednesday. I’m pretty sure that it’s a complete waste of time, because even if the old man is still hanging around watching me, he’s probably not thinking fond thoughts.

Every Wednesday, I go, and my conscious mind gets angry. He didn’t love you, I tell myself, and be honest now, you didn’t really care for him. I know this is true, because I lived all my life in our awkward relationship, but if I try to skip visiting him I find myself in tears.

-

The next time, I’d been sure I’d had them. Arkady had taught Felix, and I doubted the old man had taught his student _everything_.

He’d had them cornered and was about to do something horrible to them – drop them all down into Limbo for the rest of their lives, he’d said—when the girl had folded the ground up and around him, pinning him with cement and asphalt. Then they’d taking turns shooting each other and waking themselves up, leaving Arkady trapped in a crumbling dream.

“Like a rose,” he’d told Rossell. “The ground came up and blossomed around me like a rose.” That sounds nice enough, but possibly overly sentimental. Cobb’s attachment to his children, Arkady’s floral metaphors – are all dreamthiefs so soft?

5.

After that, I decided not to take any chances. I sent Rossell in while they working. Not very elegant, having my man kill them in their sleep, but elegant plans weren’t getting me anywhere, and after finding unpleasantly prepared marks on their last few jobs, I’m sure they were getting suspicious.

I’m not sure what the individual details would have been, because that was Rossell’s job, but it seemed simple enough: kill the one who was awake, then put a bullet in the head of each of the sleepers. That shouldn’t have been hard at all, provided that the one left awake went down quickly.

Even I, who’ve only encountered those people and have lived vicariously through Rossell’s reports, could have predicted that the skinny one would put up a fight if he was the one watching the sleepers. I’m not sure why _Rossell_ couldn’t have predicted that. I’d ask him myself, except the police fished him out of the Seine this morning and he’s apparently not going to be able to talk.

6.

After Rossell’s death, I gave up for a while. I kept visiting my father and trying to swallow my rage and for a little bit, I almost managed to convince myself that I was alright, and that I was so upset because my father and I really had loved each other but had never been able to say it.

The seventh Wednesday, I gave up on that.

Forget elegance. Forget playing fair. Forget the danger and forget the expense. Instead of my men going to them, I would bring them to me.

-

The leader was the easiest. I knew he would be. After Rossell’s botched assassination attempt, they had split up, had forgotten that their strong points were that they made up for each others’ weaknesses. They’d made vague plans to reunite when things had calmed down and Dominic Cobb went home to Cleveland, where he and his in-laws cared for his two young children.

All it took was one day when his son didn’t come home from school, and he knew. He arrived on my doorstep before Browning could make the call, begging for his son’s life.

I doubted that my father would have ever begged for mine, but thanks to Mr. Cobb, I could never be sure of that. That uncertainty, though, that uncertainty made me send the boy off to get ice cream with Browning. Just in case I was wrong and my father would have begged for me, I’d let Cobb die without his son watching.

-

The girl and the Arab, they thought they could hide behind Saito and all his money and bodyguards. When I saw how soft the two of them looked, I almost felt bad about bribing those guards to kidnap them.

Almost, then he’d pulled a syringe and tried to poison me, and she’d kicked Browning in the balls – and there’s that little bit of me, the one I’m never sure about, that cheered when she did that – and I’d stopped feeling sorry for them.

-

I’d had to blow up an entire city block to take out Arthur. The man would not go down, no matter how many international manhunts I sent after him. It had taken the better part of three days before my people had finally convinced the Israelis that the man holed up in the old apartment complex was dangerous enough to lob a missile at. Three days, and I’d been afraid he’d slip out some secret back door, but the Israelis tell me that they’re sure they got him.

-

I don’t know where the last one is. I’m sure he’s out there, waiting and plotting revenge for the deaths of his team. I look at everyone I see now and retrace my steps, trying to figure out if I’m in a dream and if the person in front of me isn’t _him_ wearing another false face. Every time Browning walks into my office, I feel that rage of betrayal, and then stop myself because the betrayal wasn’t real. Then I have to stop the rage at Eames and his fake faces, because this time, it isn’t Eames. Every time Browning walks into my office, I have to stop myself from reaching under the desk to where I have my gun hidden. One of these days, I won’t be able to stop myself.

Well, then. Come and get me, Mr. Eames. Come and get me.


End file.
